Mad Season (23 page)

“Are we losing our children?” Ruth asked Colm after she hung up, her hands still trembling.

“You can only hope they learned something,” he said. “The parents have to teach what’s right—or wrong. I think Carol Unsworth is trying, or will, when she calms down.”

“I feel sorry for her.”

“It’s about time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

But he just stuck a tongue in his cheek.

She wanted to kick him. “Then who set the fires? We’re back to that. Bertha? That broker? Harold? Those kids? Oh it’s Bertha, I’m sure of it! Mine, too.”

“Ruth.” He looked at her under his thick brows. “Yours was faulty wiring. You know that. You said it was old, that milking machine.”

“Then why were there three other fires?” She glared at him.

“They think the Charlebois fire might have been matches, didn’t I tell you that?” She shook her head, furious. “You know, those ‘strike anywhere’ kitchen matches? Jeez, those things are dangerous. Police found two empty boxes outside. Mice carry them around, they like the smell of the sulfur. Matches contact a kerosene rag and—boom!”

“You’re telling me mice set those fires? Come on. Then who left the matches there in the first place. Not the farmer!”

Well, he couldn’t tell her that, but he did know about Rupert Sheldrake, that British biologist; he’d just heard him on PBS. “His talk about habits, about animals. Like why the tits ate the cream—”

“The ‘whats’?” she said.

“Tits, they’re a kind of chickadee. Anyway, back before War World Two, some tits began pecking the tops of the glass milk bottles and eating the cream, and suddenly, tits all over Britain and Europe were sucking up the cream from milk bottles. Same thing with rats, Sheldrake says. If lab rats learn a new trick in America, rats everywhere pick it up, learn it faster. Like it’s telepathy or something.”

“So what’s in it for the barn mice? I mean, ridiculous. Mice, matches, and mental telepathy. Mad!”

“Sure,” he said. “The world goes wacky now and then. Mad season.”

“I don’t care,” she said stubbornly. “I think it was deliberate, those fires. Someone left those matches there. To see what fate would do with them, maybe. Colm, I’m on a roller coaster. I’m so dizzy I don’t know where I am, what I think! Thank God I have the cows. They’re my grounding point. Though Charlotte’s gone,” she added sadly.

He nodded, his cheek ballooned with ice. Was that all he could do? Drink and nod? He gave a lopsided smile.

“Get your glasses fixed,” she said. “You look like a clown.”

She had to stay rational. When Vic was found she’d have to think straight. She poured more coffee.

“It’s funny,” she said, thinking of Brontë’s novel. “After Bertha, Rochester’s mad wife, burned the house down, herself with it, Rochester was blinded. And Jane found she was his equal, because he was maimed, he’d lost his power. They lived in a woods, on the ‘outside.’ Like this farm, maybe, once the heart of things, now on the ‘outside,’ right?”

“How do I fit into that?” he said, blinking through his crooked glasses, wanting to be part of her life, she saw that. “Am I Rochester? Or is he Pete?”

“Oh, Pete will always keep his power. Some men are like that. Besides, he’s a city man now. He never did like farming—it’s not all his fault. He’ll come to see because of Bertha, and the kids. Of course he loves his children, I know that, he’s not a bad man. He’s offered me the whole farm if I won’t prosecute Bertha.”

She was suddenly indignant. “Won’t prosecute? After that crazy woman took my child!”

“The whole farm? You’d like that.”

“I’d like my child more. A farm’s nothing to a son.”

“I know.”

They sat in silence for a time. When she poured a sixth cup, he put his hand on the pot. She stuck hers over his glass, too, told him it worked both ways.

He said, “You’ll be too wound up to listen if Vic calls. Look, Ruth, I need to say something. About the farm. When Vic comes back—he will, you know. He probably escaped, out of that car. He could walk in here any minute. The second sight, my great-gran—”

“Oh, hell,” she said, about the great-gran. “If he escaped,” she argued, “if he’s alive, if he’s not hurt, he’d get to the police somehow.”

“He’d be afraid they might ship him back to his father. Kids’ minds work that way.”

“But why would it take so long, all this time since they found the knapsack? Why wouldn’t those men admit they’d given him a ride—if they hadn’t hurt him?”

He had no answer for that.

She felt like a child, she needed consoling. She saw a spot of dirt she’d missed on the floor and went over to wipe it up.

Still on her knees, she said, “He’s alive. I have to cling to that. I have to believe that.”

He nodded. “As I was saying about the farm, when Vic comes home—”

“When Vic comes home, yes?”

“Jeez, am I talking to a scrublady?”

She got up, her knees were killing her anyway.

“Well, Tim’s a help around the place,” he said, “and Joey, the kids. But they have their own lives. What I’m saying is, you can’t run the place alone.”

“Not you too,” she cried. “Not you wanting me to sell! You real estate pirate!”

“Down, woman! You’ve a mean temper, you know that? I’ve seen a side of you lately I never—”

“Finish your sentence, you sound like Fallon.”

He smiled. “I mean, I’m thinking of leaving the body business. I’ve had it down to the bones. I’ll find someone else to help Dad. I’m wondering if you’d take me on, just part-time, couple of hours a day, a second hired man. Out in the pasture—That barn manure, I might be allergic.”

“You?” she said, incredulous. “You don’t know one thing about farming.”

“I could learn. I can pick stone good as anybody. And I know something about fathering. I mean, I’ve fathered my own dad. That’s what it’s been, really.”

“I see. You’ve something more in mind than farming.”

He looked at her winningly (he seemed to think). “Just consider, that’s all, okay?”

“Okay.”

But she couldn’t really, not now. She couldn’t concentrate on anything else, nothing in the world—because outside a small boy was trudging up the walk, she saw him through the window. He was dressed in a dirty T-shirt and raggedy blue shorts; his bleeding, dirt-streaked arms were pumping up and down.

At the last he broke into a run, crashed up the steps, fell, got up again, and burst through the door. She was out of her chair in a shot, to meet him.

“Vic!”

“Mom!”

He sobbed in her arms, clung to her like he’d break in a million pieces if she didn’t hold on to him.

And she did, she did!

* * * *

When the phone rang again, Marie this time, about Harold, found “slumped over his electric trains,” Marie screamed—he’d shot himself in the head, Colm didn’t call for Ruth. He couldn’t keep a mother from her son, could he? They were out in the pasture, Vic wanted to see his pet calf, he’d neglected it, he felt bad, he’d worried it might have got burned. “From now on—” he promised, and they moved out of earshot.

“Hang on,” Colm told Marie, “I’ll be over,” and hung up on her screaming. He called Fallon, the ambulance, and jumped in his car.

“Divine retribution?” he said, and thought of Bertha.

Chapter Thirteen

Over her dead body that woman would get off! Ruth beat a tattoo on the refrigerator door. Bertha was out on bail, thanks to Pete, but wouldn’t come out of her house. She refused even to speak to the counselor Pete had hired, and tomorrow was the hearing. Pete was worried, he’d said on the phone, that his sister would do something desperate, shoot herself maybe, like poor Harold, though Ruth felt she wouldn’t. Bertha might be crazy, but she was a survivor.

And not wholly crazy either, Ruth told Colm on the phone. Just “calculatingly” crazy. Ruth’s mission was to see that the woman didn’t get off on any plea of insanity.

And so she was planning to storm the place, see that Bertha got to the hearing. Did Colm want to come along?

He guessed so, he said. “Bertha? Jeez, Ruth. Not again.” But had to sign off—a body had just arrived on the funeral home doorstep.

She didn’t ask whose.

She got Vic off to school with his telescope, repaired now. He was something of a hero, telling and retelling the story of how he got away from the car thieves. And an amazing tale it was: she ached to hear it, shuddering to think what
might
have happened— denying the thought. They’d stopped at a Burger King, locked him in the car, his hands tied with shoelaces. He was able to break the laces, smash a rear window with a jack he found in the rear compartment, and climb out. Then hide in a Burger King trash barrel until the thieves gave up and left.

Each time he told the story there was another more colorful— scary!—detail, a bit of profanity the thieves had used, and Ruth, smiling in spite of herself, had to ask him to tone it down.

Of course in his panic he’d left his knapsack in the car, but old Ronsard wasn’t mad at all, Vic said, she even asked him to give a demonstration of his telescope, though Ruth worried about Garth and the others, back in school. A boxing glove left on a creek bank couldn’t prove they’d hurt Willy, was proof only of irresponsibility.

“I’m afraid they’ll take it out on Vic,” she told Emily.

The girl was making an elaborate hummus and sprouts sandwich to take for lunch; she and Wilder were turning vegetarian. They couldn’t eat animal meat anymore, Emily said, it was like “being a cannibal.”

“I don’t think so,” Emily said. “Wilder doesn’t think so. It was Kurt made Garth confess—did you know that? Kurt said he’d knock Garth over the head if he didn’t. He said, did Garth want to be like him, Kurt? And Kurt made Wilder take him down to the station. And Mom, remember, Garth told on the others. So if anybody’s in trouble in school, it’s Garth. Wilder says he’s one scared kid.”

Ruth guessed she was right.

Anyway, that fat man was just as responsible for Willy’s death, Emily reminded her mother, waving a spoonful of yogurt. “The police know that, Mom.”

“More responsible. He’s a grown man!” Ruth cried.

Her nails dug into her palms to think of Kosciusko, to think of Belle. To think of Harold, even, too weak, too much the victim— of the fat man, of Marie with her new carpet, her orange drapes. Marie had moved in with Lucien now, that was a move in the right direction. At least Ruth hoped so. Only yesterday, when she’d gone over with baked ziti, Marie had a fit of hysteria: she yanked the ice out of the old Kelvinator, flung the watery cubes in the sink, said she couldn’t “look at that thing one more christly minute,” then collapsed in a pink heap on the floor. “Well, you have the insurance, you can get a new fridge,” Ruth had said by way of consolation and promised to help her shop for it.

Probably Harold had thought of that insurance when he picked up his hunting rifle, shot himself through the brains. The note said Marie could sell his trains, they were antiques, would help pay off the new white carpet. Though Marie didn’t know if she wanted to live in that house anymore. “He helped kill my mother!” she’d wailed.

“Vic’s going to Unsworths’ after school,” Emily said, shoving her lunch into a paper bag. “Garth invited him. And Vic wants to

go.”

Ruth felt a sudden alarm. Was it Garth who’d invited him, or Carol?

Then squared her shoulders, she had to quit this. Vic had stepped over some magical line now, as though the kidnapping, his running away, had aged him, emotionally if not physically. If he wanted to go he’d go. Carol would be there, at least.

Carol had called again last week, about renting the north pasture, and Sharon and Emily advised Ruth to let her. For one thing, the insurance wouldn’t pay for two new milking machines. Extra income might even buy that plate cooler she’d read about, one that could save hundreds of dollars in energy costs. It was like getting a month’s power for free, the papers said; the payoff time would be a year and a half at most.

She had dreams for the place now, as if the fire had been a cleansing, a chance to start over. She was trying to look at it that way.

But the thought of the other fires still nagged at her. “Mice, huh!” she said aloud, remembering Colm’s crazy solution, the “strike anywhere” matches. Maybe Charlebois used those matches in the kitchen, thought he
might, possibly,
have left some in the barn, but the Ashers
definitely
didn’t, they said, and their barn burned. She’d heard they were thinking of simply selling out. And the police were interrogating everyone—kids, Marie (about Harold), Esther Dolley—and no one would admit it. Of course they couldn’t even get to Bertha to ask her. She was locked up in her house. Well, Ruth determined, she’d get a confession out of that one. The anger spit up again, like undigested milk, into her throat.

* * * *

She picked Colm up at the funeral home, his Horizon was “down” again. At least he’d had his glasses straightened, he looked human now, more or less. He was pushing a corpse into a back room, a glimpse told her it was an old woman, her face was the color of sour milk. She didn’t look closely in case it was someone she knew. Bertha?

He winked, he was so cavalier about death. She was glad when he wheeled the body out of sight, went to clean up. She waited in a shabby parlor, on the edge of a horsehair sofa that scratched her legs; the wallpaper wept with a hundred willow trees. Appropriate, she thought, for a mortuary. She could smell the formaldehyde. Why hadn’t she waited in the car?

“I’ve got a battering ram in the garage,” he said, emerging in royal blue corduroys and a kelly green sweater. “We can knock her door in.” And she had to laugh, though she worried. What if Bertha
had
killed herself, lay dead even now, in the house? If that was why she wouldn’t answer the door, the phone?

“I mean, her car’s still in the driveway, she hasn’t pulled a single dandelion in her yard.”

She nodded at Colm’s father, emerging from an inner sanctum in a gray jacket and wide blue tie, slightly askew. His hair stuck straight up in the back, like he’d been hit by lightning. A middle-aged couple was tiptoeing up on the porch, to pick out a box, she supposed. She wondered if Marie had chosen the oak, with Harold’s train money. Only immediate family: Marie, Harold’s relatives (Esther with the acrylic fingernails?) had been at the burial. Michelle stayed home with Lucien (poor Michelle, her daddy dead). Kosciusko—who’d finally implicated Harold, but not his sister, Esther—was in custody.